Otto Dix, Black Nude with a Sailor. Watercolor. From the estate of Vance E. Kondon and Elisabeth Giesberger.

For almost three decades, arts patron Vance Kondon’s expressionist paintings were welcome visitors to the San Diego Museum of Art. But those three decades were the ’60s, ’70s and early ’80s, culminating in the 1984 exhibit “Early 20th Century German Art from the Vance E. Kondon Collection.”

Now, many of the artworks owned by the late San Diego collector are back, constituting roughly half of the 91 images in the Museum of Art’s “The Human Beast: German Expressionism at the San Diego Museum of Art,” opening July 21.

“We already had a good group of German expressionistic paintings, prints, drawings and watercolors,” said John Marciari, the San Diego Museum of Art’s curator of European art and head of provenance research. “But with this group added to that, we wind up with a comprehensive collection of German expressionism. We have representative examples by virtually all of the major artists in the movement, and we can document the movement’s key themes.”

Kondon died in 1997, and with the December 2011 death of his wife, Elisabeth Giesberger, the San Diego Museum of Art and the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego unexpectedly received of a treasure trove of expressionist and contemporary art from Kondon’s and Giesberger’s estates.

The Museum of Art acquired 48 works of pre-1950 art (including pieces by Egon Schiele, Gustav Klimt, Paul Klee, Max Beckmann and Otto Dix), and the Museum of Contemporary Art gained 30 works of post-1950 art (Christo, Roy Lichtenstein, Ellsworth Kelly, Brice Marden and Robert Ryman), with the total value estimated by the two institutions’ directors at approximately $45 million.

The Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego put its gift of primarily minimalist works on exhibit earlier this year in the first of a series of “Iconic” exhibitions showcasing the institution’s permanent collection.

With “The Human Beast,” the core of Kondon’s collection is on view for the first time at the San Diego Museum of Art since that 1984 show. That exhibition was guest-curated by San Diego State University’s Ida Rigby, ﻿who at the time called Kondon’s collection “undoubtedly the most focused and coherent historical collection in San Diego.”

Kondon credited arts patron Norton Walbridge (whose name is now on one of the Museum of Art’s galleries) with encouraging him to “focus on what he liked.” And what he liked was German expressionism.

“I’m excited by the vibrant colors, the powerful emotional content, the freedom of the images and the action and movement they convey,” Kondon said in a 1984 newspaper interview. “I never tire of these works.”

Gateway to contemporary art

Standing as a bridge between the tradition-bound artistic practices of the 19th century and the experimental upheavals of the 20th century, expressionism comprises a relatively broad range of art, music, design, literature and theater that had in common an obsession with humankind’s most primal tendencies.

“It tries to speak about feelings, about violence; it tries to disturb the audience,” said Roxana Velasquez, the San Diego Museum of Art’s director. “So the paintings, the drawings, are not beautiful or decorative things in pastels or light colors. They are exactly the contrary — masterpieces that portray the sense of fear or the horrors of war or the passion between lovers.”